Movie Review: The Three Musketeers

Once again showing that there’s no franchise Hollywood doesn’t like to “update” long after it’s quit making money (considering In Time grossed more than The Three Musketeers and cost less, you have to wonder if original ideas are really so risky), here is the approximately 400th retelling of The Three Musketeers. Don’t worry though, these aren’t your father’s three musketeers…they’re the ones made over the same way Sherlock Holmes was two years back…which is to say your son’s Three Musketeers as only children will seriously enjoy this.

What Works: Still, I have to say this movie could be worse. I can’t remember a single thing about this movie only two days after seeing it, but any movie with Milla Jovovich as a Mata Hari-esque spy, an airship duel, and Christoph Waltz as the villain can’t be all bad.

What Doesn’t Work: Orlando Bloom continues his kamikaze stride into irrelevance by making his only role in years the one of the SECONDARY male villain (only the 8th or 9th most important character in the movie) in The Three Musketeers’s 400th remake and he delivers a performance so bland it disappears before your eyes. Watching this sight almost depressed me into not finishing my popcorn (that and the near lethal doses of movie theater sodium in popcorn). Oh, and the movie’s not very good. There’s nothing specifically that bad about it, just not good in a thousand general ways starting with the big things like plot and ending with the little things like execution.

What I Would Have Done Differently: If I were a studio executive? Called in that same junior executive that said a remake of The Thing was a good idea and…